AN ESSAY. 13 of spiritual experiences : The expressions of it that are not Jewish or peculiar, give us constant assistance in prayer and in praise : But if we would prepare David's psalms to be sung by 'christian lips, we should observe these two plain rules. First, They ought to be translated in such a manner as we have reason to believe David would have composed them if he had lived in our day : And therefore his poems are given as a pattern to be imitated in our composures, rather than as the pre- cise and invariable matter of our psalmody. It is one of the excel- lencies of scripture - songs, that they are exactly suited to the very purpose and design for which they were written, and that botti in the matter, and in the style, and in all their ornaments : This gives life and strength to the expression, it presents objects to the ears and to the eyes, and touches the heart in the most affecting manner. David's language is adapted to his own de- votion, and to the worship of the Jewish church; he mentions the very places of his journeys, or retirements of his sorrows, or his successes ; he names the nations that were enemies of the church, or that shall be its friends ; and though for the most part he leaves the single persons of his time nameless in the body of his psalm, yet he describes them there with great particularity, and often names them in the title. This givesus abundant ground to infer, that should the sweet - singer of Israel return from the dead into our age, he would not sing the words of his own psalms without considerable alteration ; and were he now to transcribe them, he would make them speak the present circhm- stances of the church, arid that in the language of the New Testament : He would see frequently occasion to insert the cross of Christ in his song, and often interline the confessions of his sins with the blood of the Lamb ; often would he describe the gloies and the triumphs of our blessed Lord in long and flowing vei se, even as St. Paul, when he mentions the name and honours of Christ, can hardly part his lips from them again : His ex- pressions would run ever bright and clear; such as here and there we find in a single verse of his own composures, when he is transported beyond himself, and carried far away from Jewish shadows by the spirit of prophecy and the gospel. We have the more abundant reason to believe this, if we observe, that all along the sacred history as the revelations of God and his grace were made plainer, so the songs of the saints expressed that grace and those revelations according to the measure of their clearness and.increase. Let us begin at the song of Moses, Fix. xv. and proceed to David and Solomon, to the song of the Vir- gin Mary, of Zecharias, Simeon, and the Angels, the Hosanna of the young children, the praises paid to God by the disciples in the Acts, the doxològies of Paul, and the songs of the christian church in the book of the Revelation : Every beam of new light that broke into the world gave occasion of fresh joy to the saints,
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